I passed the Whitechapel Bell Foundry this afternoon and realised that it is still open for the sale of hand bells, at least until the end of April when the business is going to move offsite and be preserved, while the premises will be comprehensively redeveloped.   

Photographs in the front room record how important the building is, both as a piece of working eighteenth-century architecture and, perhaps more importantly, as an example of industrial archaeology.   

Here it is as it was in 1906:-

There is the surviving residue of historic working practices:-

And bells in the back yard:-

I happened to pass Harvey Cabaniss’s patisserie/chocolate shop/general supplier which is one of the best things about Spitalfields – full of the character that small specialist shops have brought to the area.   It is now at risk of closure because of the gigantic hike in business rates starting on April 1st. which may drive out these small imaginative businesses by making them unaffordable.   I hope this is something that Sadiq Khan is addressing, as well as Jeanette Winterson, who owns the building in which the shop is currently housed:-

I have been involved in recording some radio programmes about the characteristics of East London which will be broadcast on Resonance FM in late April or May when my book comes out.   What comes across is the extent to which Michael von Clemm’s realisation that it might be possible to build a version of a north American city out amongst the old banana warehouses of West India Docks was the moment of greatest transition.   Either Piers Gough or Ellis Woodman made the point that the first great tower designed by Cesar Pelli follows the model of Egyptian funerary architecture:  it’s a stele.   It gives the development a monumentalism which is lacking in other London skyscrapers;  and it’s clad in aluminium rather than marble to reflect the London sky:-

Piers Gough accused me yesterday of being more interested in old buildings than new.   I’m not convinced this is true.   So, in his honour I am posting pictures of one of the many buildings he has done in Bermondsey and Southwark, the yellow Bankside building which he did in 1999 for the Manhattan Loft Corporation just before the opening of Tate Modern:-